Journal of Medieval History 27 (2001) 181195 www.elsevier.

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Historiographical essay

On Cathars, Albigenses, and good men of Languedoc

Mark Gregory Pegg
Department of History, Washington University, Campus Box 1062, One Brookings Drive, St Louis, Missouri 63130-4899, USA

Abstract This essay proposes a re-evaluation of how Cathars, Albigenses, and the heresy of the good men are studied. It argues that some commonplace notions about the Cathars, virtually unaltered for over a hundred years, are far from settled especially when inquisition records from Languedoc are taken into account. It is this historiography, supported by a tendency to see heresy in idealist and intellectualist bias, suggests how the history of the Cathars and the good men might be rethought. 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.
Keywords: Cathars; Albigenses; Good men; Languedoc; Heresy; Bogomils

The article on the Cathars in the splendid 11th edition (1910) of the Encyclopdia Britannica, written with a kind of giddy elegance by Frederick Conybeare, begins by noting that these medieval heretics were the debris of an early Christianity. The Cathars were, and Conybeare had no doubts about this, the direct descendants of late antique Manicheans who, after a long and hidden diaspora, resurfaced between the tenth and fourteenth centuries as Paulicians and Bogomils in the Balkans and, with somewhat less discrimination in western Europe, as just about any heretic with vaguely dualist tendencies. Catharism, in this epic narrative, reached its apogee in the heresy of the good men (boni homines, bons omes) of Languedoc.1 No matter
This essay condenses, renes, and occasionally expands, some of the arguments made in M.G. Pegg, The corruption of angels: The great inquisition of 12451246 (Princeton, 2001), esp. 1519, 141151. 1 F. Conybeare, Cathars, Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. (Cambridge, 1910), vol. 5, 515517. Conybeare, in: The key of truth: A manual of the Paulician Church of Armenia (Oxford, 1898), argued on lvlvi that the Paulicians were the direct ancestors of the Cathars. Indeed, he included a translation on pp. 160170 of the Provencal Cathar ritual edited by Leon Cledat in Le Nouveau Testament traduit ` au XIIIe siecle en langue provencale, suivi dun rituel cathare (Paris, 1897), 47082. J.B. Bury discussed
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the time, no matter the place, all were one and the same heresy. Five volumes earlier in the eleventh edition (skipping, though not ignoring, Moses Gasters pithy sketch of the Bogomils as the heirs of the Manicheans and frequent tourists in northern Italy) the entry on the Albigenses by Paul Daniel Alphandery adopted a slightly more restrained tone than Conybeare. The Manicheans were ignored, the inuence of the Bogomils and Paulicians taken seriously, and the Albigenses, as Catharist heretics, initially appearing in the Limousin between 1012 and 1020, nally immi grated to the Toulousain in the early twelfth century.2 Conybeare and Alphandery neatly abridged what was assumed about the Cathars, the Albigenses, the heresy of the good men, indeed all medieval heresies, in the century before them.3 Yet, somewhat more surprisingly, these two Edwardian scholars in their verve, erudition, and sheer wrong-headedness, anticipated what a great many historians have thought since.4 A powerful intellectualist and idealist bias is what unites the historical assumptions of the last century with the techniques used, consciously or not, at the start of this
this work of Conybeares, and agreed with his notion of Paulician ancestry for the heretics of Languedoc, in an appendix to his edition of Edward Gibbons The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1898) vol. 5, 543. Gibbon himself, 1245, thought the Albigensians (as he called the good men) were descended from the Paulicians as well. Conybeares other publications which mentioned the Cathars: A hitherto unpublished treatise against the Italian Manicheans, American Journal of Theology, 3 (1899), 70428 and, with F.P. Badham, Fragments of an ancient (? Egyptian) Gospel used by the Cathars of Albi, The Hibbert Journal, 11 (1913), 80518, argued for similar continuities. Now see W. Wakeelds comments on Conybeare in Notes on some antiheretical writings of the thirteenth century, Franciscan Studies, 27 (1967), 285321, esp. 285 n. 4. The anonymous author of the entry Katharer in (what is usually considered to be the German equivalent of the 11th ed.) Brockhaus Konversations=Lexikon (Berlin, 1902), vol. 10, 229230, made the same connections through history and over geography as Conybeare (and the bibliography is a short but learned list of exemplary nineteenth-century scholarship). 2 P.D. Alphandery, Albigenses, Encyclopdia Britannica, vol. 1, 505506, and M. Gaster, Bogom ils, ibid., vol. 5, 119120. Alphandery, ibid., vol. 14, 587596, also wrote the balanced and learned entry on Inquisition, The. Again, see Albigenses, Brockhaus Konversations=Lexikon (Berlin, 1901), vol. 1, 329330, and Bogomilen ibid., vol. 3, 173. Now, see P.D. Alphandery, Les idees morales chez les ` heterodoxes latins au debut du XIIIe siecle (Paris, 1903), and his La chretiente et lidee de croisade. Texte etabli par Alphonse Dupront (Paris, 1954). 3 See, for example, S.R. Maitland, Facts and documents illustrative of the history, doctrine, and rites of the ancient Albigenses and Waldenses (London, 1832), esp. 92, who thought that the southern French Albigensians were Paulician immigrants. The great Frederic Maitland wrote a very revealing letter about his grandfather Samuel Roffey in The letters of Frederic William Maitland, ed. C.H.S. Fifoot (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), No. 98, to Selina Maitland, 22 Nov. 1891, 98. C. Schmidt, Histoire et doctrine des Cathares (Bayonne, 1983, orig. 1849, 2 vols), esp. 154, and H.C. Lea, A history of the inquisition of the middle ages (New York, 1887), vol. 1, 8992, argued for a broad chain of ideas, through time and over space, in a manner similar to Conybeares. On Schmidt, see Y. Dossat, Un initiateur: Charles Schmidt, Cahiers de Fanjeaux: Historiographie du catharisme, 14 (1979), 163184 and B. Hamilton, The state of research: the legacy of Charles Schmidt to the study of Christian dualism, Journal of medieval history, 24 (1998), 191214. On Lea, see E. Peters, Henry Charles Lea (1825 1909), in: Medieval scholarship. Biographical studies on the formation of a discipline, 1: history, ed. H. Damico and J. B. Zavadil (New York, 1995), 89100. 4 In the far from splendid The New Encyclopdia Britannica, Micropdia, 15th ed. (Chicago, 1987), vol. 2, 951, the anonymous author of the half-page entry on the Cathari says almost exactly the same as Conybeare did eighty years earlier but without the latters erudition or air.

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one. All heresies, like all religions, are understood to be nothing more than distinctive attitudes, abstract doctrines, clear philosophies, elaborate discourses, pristine representations, in other words, intellectually pure entities, able to be cleanly sifted out from other less coherent ideas and, most crucially, never contaminated by material existence or historical specicity.5 Anything that is not the stuff of thoughts, like a habit or an action, a practice or a behaviour, is assumed to follow an idea wherever it may go, sometimes kicking and screaming, sometimes mute and passive, either way it makes no difference, because the intellectualist bias takes it for granted that worlds are made from theories, that cultures are hammered together from discourses, and that the elaboration of a philosophy is all the explanation a scholar need ever give.6 The heresy of the good men, for instance, becomes nothing more than a set
5 This view was explicitly stated by Herbert Grundmann throughout his inuential Religiose Bewegungen im Mittelalter. Untersuchungen uber die geschichtlichen Zusammenhange zwischen der Ketz erei, den Bettelorden und der religiosen Frauenbewegung im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert und uber die geschichtlichen Grundlagen der deutschen Mystik, 2nd ed. (Hildesheim, 1961, orig. 1935), esp. 396ff, 503 [trans. by S. Rowan as Religious movements in the middle ages: the historical links between heresy, the mendicant orders, and the womens religious movement in the twelfth and thirteenth century, with the historical foundations of German mysticism (Notre Dame, 1995), and see esp. R.E. Lerner, Introduction, ixxxv]. It is implicit, as far as Catharism is concerned, in: J. Duvernoy, Le catharisme: la religion des cathares (Toulouse, 1976); J. Duvernoy, Cathares, Vaudois et Beguins, dissidents du pays dOc ` (Toulouse, 1994); R. Nelli, La philosophie du catharisme. le dualisme radical au XIIIe siecle (Paris, 1978); and A. Brenon, Le vrai visage du Catharisme (Portet-sur-Garonne, 1988). Now see J.B. Russell, Interpretations of the origins of medieval heresy, Medieval Studies, 25 (1963), 34, where he emphasised over thirty years ago that most modern writers, especially Grundmann, favoured intellectual or moral reasons for medieval heresy and implicitly rejected any thesis that wanted to include the material world. The irony here is not only that Russells observation is still correct but that the somewhat older Russell, in works such as Lucifer. The devil in the middle ages (Ithaca, 1984) or A history of heaven: the singing silence (Princeton, 1998), is just as intellectualist, ahistorical, and moralising, as the historians his younger self had once criticised. A recent learned, passionate, though rather shrill, restatement of the intellectualist approach to religion is B.S. Gregory, Salvation at stake: Christian martyrdom in early modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), esp. 115, 342352. On the idealist bias generally in the study of religion, see especially M. Douglas, Rightness of categories, in: How classication works. Nelson Goodman among the social sciences, ed. M. Douglas and D. Hull, (Edinburgh, 1992), 239271; M. Douglas, In the wilderness. The doctrine of delement in the Book of Numbers (Shefeld, 1993), 2629; M. Douglas, Comment: hunting the Pangolin, Man, n.s. 28 (1993), 161164. Two much cited anthropological justications of an intellectualist and idealist attitude towards religion (and so heresy) are R. Horton, African conversion, Africa, 41 (1971), 85108 and C. Geertz, Religion as a cultural system, in his The interpretation of cultures. Selected essays (New York, 1973), 87125. 6 This attitude governed Arno Borsts important Die Katharer (Stuttgart, 1953) and, under the confessed inuence of Borst, Malcolm Lamberts revised Medieval heresy: popular movements from the Gregorian reform to the Reformation, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1992, orig. 1977), esp. 126, n. 126. This guiding assumption caused Borst, Die Katharer, 49, to refer, rather weirdly, to Austin Evans not especially outlandish arguments about heresy as being based upon a sozialistische These, simply because Evans thought that there was some relation between the society in which heretics lived and their beliefs. Now see Evans, Social aspects of medieval heresy, in: Persecution and liberty. Essays in honor of George Lincoln Burr (New York, 1931), 93116 and J.H. Mundy, The repression of Catharism at Toulouse (Toronto, 1985), 57, n. 49. Signicantly, Borst discussed the life and work of Grundmann (it reveals much about both men) in Herbert Grundmann (19021970) in: Herbert Grundmann Ausgewahlte Aufsatze. Teil 1 Religiose Bewegungen (Stuttgart, 1976), 125. Some useful insights on Grundmann, and the study of medieval religion in general, are given in S. Farmer and B.H. Rosenwein, Introduction, in: Monks and

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of stable dualist ideas (good God, bad God, benign spirit, evil matter) lodged in the heads of people which, if those minds move, so too those vacuum-sealed beliefs. The original heresy, no matter how many different societies rose and fell through the decades, no matter how great the geographical and cultural differences, stays recognizably the same.7 Heresies, as Sir Thomas Browne gracefully encapsulated this idealist tendency three and a half centuries ago, perish not with their Authors, but like the River Arethusa, though they lose their currents in one place, they rise up againe in another.8 An important observation is warranted here, in that the letters, polemics, treatises, exempla, inquisitorial manuals, sermons, all writings by intellectuals in the Middle Ages that seem to be describing dualist heresies, and which always present the ideas of heretics as coherent and articulate, and which are used by historians to demonstrate all kinds of dualist heterodox connections, actually demonstrate much more powerfully a rigid and inescapable anti-dualism, for want of a better phrase, that, rst developing in the eleventh century and reaching fruition by the end of the thirteenth, saw the potential for heresy in almost anything that was vaguely dissenting from the Church. It was for this reason that labelling men and women accused of heresy as Manichaeans like the Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach in the early thirteenth century who compared the Albigensians to them or, fty years later, the Franciscan William of Rubruck knowing that the theological idiocies of a false Armenian monk at the Mongol court were undoubtedly the dualist errors of Mani or, fty years later again, how the Dominican inquisitor Bernard Gui had no reservations about renaming the good men of the Toulousain with this soubriquet was, at one and the same time, a realisation that the new was always revealed in the old, that heresy had always lingered in the world, and that heretics were never isolated, never unconnected to each other, but always organised, always threatening.9
nuns, saints and outcasts: religion in medieval society. Essays in honor of Lester K. Little, ed. S. Farmer and B.H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, 2000), 23. 7 S. Runcimans The medieval Manichee. A study of the Christian dualist heresy (Cambridge, rpr. 1982, orig. 1947), esp. 62, 8788, 171174, is a famous illustration of this assumption about being able to delineate original religious intent despite millennia and landscape. H. Soderberg, La Religion des Cathares: Etude sur le Gnosticisme de la basse antiquite et du moyen age (Uppsala, 1949), argued for such crystalline continuities. Y. Stoyanov in his The hidden tradition in Europe: the secret history of medieval Christian heresy (London, 1994) and reissued, but heavily revised, as The other God: dualist religions from antiquity to the Cathar heresy (New Haven, 2000) assumes the same ability to follow dualist thought through time and space, whether Mahayana Buddhism, Manichaeism, Bogomilism, or Catharism. On not wishing to get mired in the monotonous and undifferentiated continuities assumed, without reection, to exist across the centuries, especially with regard to religion and epitomised by idealist methods of Religionsgeschichte, see P. Brown in The rise and function of the holy man in late antiquity, 19711997, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 6 (1998), 375. 8 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio medici (1636) in: Selected writings, ed. G. Keynes (London, 1968), 12. 9 Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, ed. J. Strange (Cologne, 1851), 1, V, xxi, 300 303, under the chapter De haeresi Albiensium; William of Rubruck, Itinerarium Willelmi de Rubruc, ed. A. Van den Wyngaert, Sinica Franciscana I (Quaracchi, 1929), 295 [trans. by P. Jackson, with excellent notes by him and David Morgan, as The mission of Friar William of Rubruck: his journey to the court of the Great Khan Mongke 12531255 (London, 1990), 232, 284285, for the incident and a commentary on this Manichaean heresy]; and Bernard Gui, Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis, ed. C. Douais

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Admittedly, tracing the origins of the heretical good men all the way back to the Manichaeans, though still found in all kinds of surprising places, is far less common than a century ago.10 A subtle scholarly variation on this theme has the gnosis of Mani sneaking back into medieval western Europe through the Byzantine Bogomils who, it is tacitly understood, were undoubtedly inuenced by this late antique heresy.11 As for there being any genuine intimacy between the Bogomils and the heretical good men, it is neither obvious nor irrefutable that such a liaison ever existed, even though the assumption of such a connection between the two heresies has become a truism in almost all studies of medieval heterodoxy.12 For a start, any
(Paris, 1886), esp. Part 5, 235355. The Benedictine Wibald of Corvey, writing to Manegold of Paderborn in 1147, deftly stated the guiding principle of this explanatory technique (medieval and modern) when he noted, in Ep. 167, Monumenta Corbeiensia, ed. P. Jaffe (Berlin, 1864), vol. 1, 278, that so much had already been written that it is impossible to say anything new [ut nichil iam possit dici novum] and that even heretics do not invent new things but repeat old ones [non nova inveniunt, set vetera replicant]. Three or four years earlier, Eberwin, the prior of Steinfelds Premonstratensian abbey, in a letter (Ep. 472, PL 182, col. 679) to Bernard of Clairvaux, described a group of heretics (usually, and incorrectly, labelled as Cathars) seized in Cologne who, when brought to trial, defended their beliefs by saying that their heresy had lain concealed from the time of the martyrs even to our own day, and, intriguingly, they went on to say that these hidden philosophies had apparently persisted so in Greece and certain other lands [...hanc haeresim usque ad haec tempora occultatam fuisse a temporibus martyrum, et permansisse in Graecia et quibusdam aliis terris]. On heresy and anti-dualism, see M.G. Pegg, Questions about questions: manuscript 609 and the great inquisition of 12451246, in: Trials and treatises: texts on heresy and inquisition, ed. P. Biller and C. Bruschi (Woodbridge, forthcoming). 10 See, for example, in the nineteenth century, J. Michelet, Histoire de France: moyen age (Paris, 1869), ` vol. 2, 317319; C. Douais, Les Albigeois. Leurs origines, action de leglise au XIIe siecle (Paris, 1879), 1216; Lea, A history of the inquisition of the middle ages, vol. 1, esp. 92. In the twentieth and twentyrst centuries see, for example, C.H. Haskins, Robert le Bougre and the beginnings of the inquisition in northern France, American Historical Review, 7 (1902), 440441; Soderberg, La Religion des Cathares, passim, esp. 6, 82, 265268; H. Sproemberg, Die Enstehung des Manichaismus im Abendland, in: Mittelalter und demokratische Geschichtsschreibung, ed. H. Sproemberg and M. Unger (Berlin, 1971), ` 85102; A. Abel, Aspects sociologiques des religions manicheennes, in: Melanges offerts a Rene Crozet, ed. R. Crozet, P. Gallais, and Y. J. Rion (Poitiers, 1966) 1, 3346; R. French and A. Cunningham, Before science: the invention of the Friars natural philosophy (Aldershot, 1996), 103, where the derivation of Catharism from Manicheeism is almost certainly correct, and on its long journey, chronologically and geographically, the heresy has developed variations; L. Kaelber, Schools of asceticism: ideology and organization in medieval religious communities (University Park, 1998), 175; and R. Weis, The yellow cross: the story of the last Cathars 12901329 (London, 2000), esp. xv and 137, where a confused, and confusing, link appears to be made between Catharism and Manichaeism. Hamilton, The state of research: the legacy of Charles Schmidt to the study of Christian dualism, 194195, implies that a continuity may still be established between the Manichaeans and the Cathars. Interestingly, Schmidt, Histoire et doctrine des Cathares, 253, thought there was no connection between the Cathars and the Manichees. P. Jimenez, La vision medievale du catharisme chez les historiens des annees 1950: un neo-manicheisme, Heresis, 7 (1994), 6596, is a good survey of this issue and many others relating to the historiography of Catharism. 11 See, for example, D. Obolensky, The Bogomils: a study in Balkan neo-Manichaeism (Cambridge, 1948), 109110, and Antoine Dondaine, Aux origines de lheresie medievale, Rivista di storia della chiesa in Italia, 6 (1952), 78, ...les Cathares occidentaux etaient ls des Bogomils, eux-memes heritiers du lointain Manicheisme. 12 ` On the Bogomils, see F. Sanjak, Les chretiens bosniaques et le movement cathare XIIeXVe siecles (Brussels, 1976); F. Sanjak, Dernieres traces de catharisme dans les Balkans, Cahiers de Fanjeaux: effacement du Catharisme? (XIIIeXIVe S.), 20 (1985), 119134; J. Sidak, Studije O,,Crkvi Bosanskoj i

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suggestion that Bogomil preachers were in Europe from the rst millennium onwards and that these Bosnian or Bulgarian seers were the cause of almost all eleventhcentury heresy is simply untenable because this argument rests, quite weakly, on the historian simply perceiving a similarity between one set of ideas and another.13 A
Bogumilstvu (Zagreb, 1976); D. Angelov, Der Bogomilismus in Bulgarien, Bulgarian historical review, 2 (1975), 3454; and J. Sidak, Ursprung und Wesen des Bogomilentums, in: The concept of heresy in the middle ages (11th13th C.). Proceedings of the International Conference, Louvain May 1316, 1973, ed. W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst (The Hague, 1976), 144156. By contrast, J.V.A. Fine, Jr., The early medieval Balkans. A critical survey from the sixth to the late twelfth century (Ann Arbor, 1983), 179, notes, [I]f we are analyzing Bulgarian history as a whole and signicant movements and causes of historical developments in Bulgaria, Bogomilisms importance has been tremendously exaggerated in all historical works. In fact one would be justied in writing a history of medieval Bulgaria without the Bogomils at all. Indeed, in P. Stephensons recent Byzantiums Balkan frontier: a political study of the northern Balkans, 9001204 (Cambridge, 2000), the Bogomils receive no mention. 13 See, for example, the arguments for Bogomil inuence in western Europe before the twelfth century by Borst, Die Katharer, 7180; Runciman, The medieval Manichee, 11718; Dondaine, Aux origines de lheresie medievale, 4378; Lambert, Medieval heresy: popular movements from Bogomil to Hus, 1st ed. (London, 1977), 2436, 343348; J-P. Poly and E. Bournazel, La Mutation feodale, xexiie (Paris, 1980), 382427 [translated by C. Higgitt as The feudal transformation, 9001200 (New York, 1991), 272308]; H. Fichtenau, Ketzer und Professoren: Haresie un Vernunftglaube im Hochmittelalter (Munich, 1992), 1753 [trans. D.A. Kaiser as Heretics and scholars in the high middle ages: 10001200 (University Park, 1998), 1351]; M. Frassetto, The sermons of Ademar of Chabannes and the letter of Heribert: new sources concerning the origins of medieval heresy, Revue Benedictine, 109 (1999), 324340; and C. Taylor, The Letter of Heribert of Perigord as a source for dualist heresy in the society of early eleventhcentury Aquitaine, Journal of Medieval History, 26 (2000), 313349. R.I. Moore, Heresy, repression, and social change in the age of Gregorian reform, in: Christendom and its discontents. Exclusion, persecution, and rebellion, 10001500, ed. S.L. Waugh and P.D. Diehl (Cambridge, 1996), 1946, and The birth of popular heresy: A Millennial phenomenon? Journal of Religious History, 24 (2000), 825, repeats his nuanced opposition, rst articulated in The origins of medieval heresy, History, 55 (1970), 2136, to these opinions. Other important arguments against Bogomil inuence in the early Middle Ages were ` made by R. Morghen, Medioevo Cristiano (Bari, 1953), 21286; R. Morghen, Problemes sur lorigine de lheresie au moyen-age, Revue Historique, 336 (1966), 116; H-C. Puech, Catharisme medieval et bogomilisme, in his Sur le Manicheisme et autres essais (Paris, 1979), 395427; R. Manselli, Leresia del male (Naples, 1963), 11838; B. Stock, The implications of literacy. Written language and models of interpretation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Princeton, 1983), 9899, 102103; G. Lobrichon, The Chiaroscuro of heresy: early eleventh-century Aquitaine as seen from Auxerre, in: The peace of God: social violence and religious response in France around the year 1000, ed. T. Head and R. Landes ` (Ithaca, 1992), 80103, and his Arras, 1025, ou le vrai proces dune fausse accusation, in: Inventer lheresie?: discours polemiques et pouvoirs avant linquisition, ed. M. Zerner (Nice, 1998), 6785. R. Landes, Relics, apocalypse, and the deceits of history. Ademar of Chabannes, 9891034 (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 188189, argues, somewhat inconclusively, that heretics in the early Middle Ages suffered from this Manichaean scapegoating because such scapegoating made sense of a confusing and disappointing world. Now, without going into the ephemeral problem of millennialism around 1000, which really only exists if one has an intellectualist bias, see R. Landes, The birth of heresy: a millennial phenomenon, Journal of Religious History, 24 (2000), 2643 (which is also a rather angry reply to Moores The birth of popular heresy: a millennial phenomenon?). Hamilton, The state of research: the legacy of Charles Schmidt to the study of Christian dualism, 196198, while not openly suggesting Bogomil missionaries before the twelfth century, still condemns what he calls reductionist arguments that dismiss the possibility of such Balkan visitors to western Europe. Furthermore, searching within the handful of reported (and persecuted) incidents of heresy in western Europe before the middle of the twelfth century for pre-Catharism or proto-Catharism by simply unearthing what appear to be dualist

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more nuanced (and more persuasive) vision imagines Balkan missionaries only coming to Europe in the twelfth century. Still, despite some allusions to wisdom arriving from the east in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as well as the small number of questionable references to heretical holy men journeying from the Byzantine empire to northern France, northern Italy and, especially, southwestern Languedoc with the apocryphal papa Nicetas distributing dualist doctrine in the Lauragais, the efforts to truly link the Bogomils and the good men remain unconvincing.14 Paulician inuence
images, or through recognizing an inherent sameness about heretical anti-clericism between one century ` and the next, are more exercises in the quixotic than in quiddity. J. Duvernoy, Le probleme des origines du catharisme, in his Cathare, Vaudois et Beguines, dissidents du pays dOc (Toulouse, 1994), 3952; A. Brenon, Les heresies de lan mil: nouvelles perspectives sur les origines du catharisme, Heresis, 24 (1995), 2136; and A. Brenon, The voice of the good women: an essay on the pastoral and sacerdotal role of women in the Cathar Church, in: Women preachers and prophets through two millennia of Christianity, ed. B.M. Kienzle and P.J. Walker (Berkeley, 1998), esp. 115116, who lean heavily toward searching for, and believing in, proto-Catharism in earlier European heresies. 14 G. Rottenwohrer, Der Katherismus: Die Herkunft der Katharer nach Theologie und Geschichte (Bad Honnef, 1990), vol. 3, 74114, 570571; Fichtenau, Ketzer und Professoren, 70119 [Heretics and Scholars, 70126]; B. Hamilton, Wisdom from the East: the reception by the Cathars of eastern dualist texts, in: Heresy and literacy, 10001530, ed. P. Biller and A. Hudson (Cambridge, 1994), 3860, which, it should be pointed out, opens by stating that [n]o reputable scholar now doubts that Catharism was an offshoot of medieval eastern dualism; M. Lambert, The Cathars (Oxford, 1998), 2959; and M. Barber, The Cathars: dualist heretics in Languedoc in the high middle ages (Harlow, 2000), 633, are all good, as well as nuanced, recent summaries of the evidence (and scholarship) for missionary and doctrinal connections between the Cathars and the Bogomils. J. and B. Hamilton, Christian dualist heresies in the Byzantine world c. 650c. 1450 (Manchester, 1998) is a remarkable collection of translated sources on dualism and has a useful Historical introduction, 155. The visit by the supposed Bogomil bishop of Constantinople, papa Nicetas, to Saint-Felix-de-Caraman in the Lauragais happened in 1167. The document that records Nicetas journey is lost and only exists as an appendix to Guillaume Besses Histoire des ducs, marquis et comtes de Narbonne, autrement appellez princes des Goths, ducs de Septimanie, et ` marquis de Gothie. Dedie a Monseigneur lArchevesque duc de Narbonne (Paris, 1660), 483486. This document, given to Besse by M. Caseneuue, Prebendier au chapitre de leglisle de Sainct Estienne de Tolose, en lan 1652, 483, is probably (at best) a mid-thirteenth-century forgery by some good men or their followers rather than a seventeenth-century forgery or a late thirteenth-century collation of a number of disparate documents by an inquisitor in Toulouse. Also, if it really existed, it probably was preserved until the seventeenth century in the Dominican inquisitorial archives at Toulouse or Carcassonne, where a number of other apocryphal documents supposedly demonstrating eastern links were led away by inquisitors in the late thirteenth century. B. Hamilton, The Cathar council of S. Felix reconsidered, Archivum fratrum praedicatorum, 48 (1978), 2353, is generally assumed to have proven the historical validity of Besses appendix. Now, because so much about this document resembles a story by Jorge Luis Borges, and because one needs to already believe in connections between Cathars and Bogomils to see the evidence within the text (even though the text itself is the foundational proof underlying this belief about Catharism and Bogomilism), it is more prudent, for the present, to remain unconvinced about its historical veracity. In support of Hamilton, see, for example, Pilar Jimenez, Relire la Charte de Niquinta 1) Origine et problematique de la Charte, Heresis, 22 (1994), 126, and her, Relire la Charte de Niquinta 2) Sens et portee de la charte, Heresis, 23 (1994), 128; P. Biller, Popular religion in the central and late middle ages, in: Companion to historiography, ed. M. Bentley (London, 1997), 239240; Lambert, The Cathars, 4559; and Barber, The Cathars, 2122, 7173. Cf. Yves Dossat, A propos du concile cathare de Saint-Felix: les Milingues, Cahiers de Fanjeaux: Cathares en Languedoc, 3 (1968), 201214, where it is argued that Besses document was a seventeenth-century forgery (and probably forged by Besse). It has also been argued that Bogomil dualism was secretly carried back by crusaders returning from twelfth-century Outremer. On such heretical transmissions from the Levant,

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upon the good men and good women, whether through missionaries or through immigration, has never been championed in the same way as Bogomilism.15 All in all, arguments about the specic inuence of the Bogomils upon western European heresy, either in the eleventh century or in the twelfth, rely upon detecting likenesses between ideas irrespective of time and place. Searching for what seems similar over the longue duree, or between les vastes espaces, cannot account for former predictive or inductive practices.16 Piecing together the similar in time and space may be, in the end, all that the historian actually does, but it is only the beginning of an explanation about the past and not, as is often assumed, the concluding proof, in and of itself, about why a particular society once thought certain ideas worth thinking. Two apparently similar Indo-European symbols, two popular mentalites, two dualist discourses, two religious Zusam menhange, though undeniably interesting, prove nothing conclusive in themselves about heresy in the Middle Ages. The reasons why someone in the early twentyrst century believes that two things truly resemble each other, or can safely predict certain continuities from today to tomorrow, should never be confused with (or assumed to be the same as) the certainties that men and women in the thirteenth century knew (or attempted to know) about their world. As such, if one were to nd, for example, ostensibly matching heresies from the thirteenth century in the very same region in the eleventh, then even with the same words, beliefs, representations, and symbols, the similarity would be, at best, supercial, while the meaning, in any case, could not be the same. To study heresy, therefore, as though ideas wander over landscapes and centuries like loose hot-air balloons, so that the trick is to catch
` Christine Thouzellier, Heresie et croisade au XIIe siecle, Revue dHistoire Ecclesiastique, 49 (1954), 855872, was the rst to strongly suggest the importation of dualist beliefs by returning crusaders. Along similar lines to Thouzellier, Karl Heisig in Ein gnostische Sekte im abendlandischen Mittelalter, Zeitschrift fur Religions und Geistesgeschichte, 16 (1964), 27174, suggested that crusaders brought ancient Gnostic practices back from the East to the Rhineland. 15 On the Paulicians see, especially, N. Garsoan, The Paulician heresy. A study of the origin and development of Paulicianism in Armenia and the eastern Provinces of the Roman Empire (The Hague Paris, 1967), esp. 1821, where she argues against Paulician inuence in western Europe in the Middle Ages. Garsoan, 186230, also strongly rejects the Paulicians as descendants of Manichees; rather, she considers the original Paulicians to be nothing more than Armenian Old Believers an argument that is perhaps as unconvincing, and certainly just as unprovable, as the one she rejects. Bernard Hamilton cannot let go of the notion that there must be some connection between the Paulicians and the Cathars despite the dearth of evidence in his The origins of the dualist church of Drugunthia, Eastern Churches Review, 6 (1974), 115124, his Wisdom from the East, 5051, and his Christian dualist heresies in the Byzantine world c. 650c. 1450, 525. 16 The ideas in this paragraph were derived from N. Goodman, Seven strictures against similarity, in his Problems and projects (Indianapolis, 1972), 446. See also N. Goodman, The new riddle of induction, in his Fact, ction, and forecast, 4th ed. (Cambridge, 1983), 5983; N. Goodman, Of mind and other matters (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984); N. Goodman with C. Elgin, Reconceptions in philosophy and other arts and sciences (Indianapolis, 1988), 446. See, also, the collected (philosophical) essays on the problem of grue put forward in Goodmans The new riddle of induction in: The new riddle of induction, ed. D. Stalker (Chicago, 1994), esp. I. Hacking, Entrenchment, 193224, and the collected (historical, philosophical, anthropological) essays in: How classication works. Nelson Goodman among the social sciences, ed. M. Douglas and D. Hull (Edinburgh, 1992).

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those drifting beliefs which look similar to each other, allows for whatever ideal contextualisation, whatever intellectual continuity, an erudite zepplin-chaser so chooses. Likewise, explanations which treat heresy as solely a manifestation of purely economic or material problems, as an expression of social or class discontent, not unlike something from the revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are just as limited as the more prevalent arguments from the similarity of ideas.17 A peculiar irony about these theses, tying such dated Cold War MarxistLeninist approaches to equally dated Victorian Romantic notions, and so elevating both above the level of just curiosity value, indeed an irony permeating much historical thinking about the Middle Ages, is that if the material world is thought to be unchanging, as physical existence in the medieval countryside is especially thought to be, then the beliefs concerned with that world are assumed to be unchanging as well.18 Rural communi17 For example, E. Werner, Pauperes Christi. Studien zu sozial-religiosen Bewegungen im Zeitalter des Reformpapsttums (Leipzig, 1957); M. Erbstosser and E. Werner, Ideologische Probleme des Mittelalterlichen Plebejertums: Die freigeistige Haresie und ihre sozialen Wurzeln (Berlin, 1960); G. Koch, Frauenfrage und Ketzertum in Mittelalter (Berlin, 1962); B. Topfer, Das kommende Reich des Friedens; zur Entwicklung chiliasticscher Zukunftshoffnungen im Hochmittelalter (Berlin, 1964); M. Erbstosser, Ketzer im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1984) [trans. J. Fraser as Heretics in the Middle Ages (Leipzig, 1984)]; and M. Erbstosser and E. Werner, Ketzer und Heilige: Das religiose Leben im Hochmittelalter (Vienna, 1986). On this (especially former East German, especially Karl-Marx University of Leipzig) way with history that, despite the Marxist materialism, had many afnities with the medieval vision of a Jules Michelet, see Andreas Dorpalen, German history in Marxist perspective: The East German approach (Detroit, 1985), esp.7476, 9192; W. Malecsek, Le ricerche eresiologiche in area germanica, in: Eretici ed eresie medievali nella storiograa contemporanea: atti del XXXII Convegno du studi seilla Riforma e i movimenti religiosi in Italia, ed. G.G. Merlo (Torre Pellice, 1994), 6493, esp. 6875; P. Biller, Cathars and material women, in: Medieval theology and the natural body, ed. P. Biller and A.J. Minnis (Woodbridge, 1997), 7581; Fichtenau, Ketzer und Professoren, 110113 [Heretics and scholars, 115 119]; and Kaelber, Schools of asceticism, 196202. It was also this East German treatment of medieval heresy and spirituality that Borst and Grundmann, working within the idealist Religionsgeschichte tradition, sincere anti-Marxists, and West Germans after World War II, consciously reacted against. An informed observation on this issue is made by Lerner in his introduction to Grundmann, Religious movements in the middle ages, xxiixxv. James Given, stepping outside of this historiographic debate, has adopted a subtle neo-Marxist approach in his Inquisition and medieval society: power, discipline, and resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca, 1997). For further discussions about German historians and heresy, see D. Muller, La perspective de lhistoriographie allemande, Heresis, 7 (1994), 4764, and for German historians and the Middle Ages, see O.G. Oexle, Die Moderne und ihr Mittelalter eine folgenreiche Problemgeschichte, in: Mittelalter und Moderne: Entdeckung und Rekonstruktion der mittelalterlichen Welt. Kpngreakten des 6. Symposiums des Mediavistenverbandes in Bayreuth 1995, ed. P. Segl (Sigmaringen, 1997), 307364. 18 ` See, for example, E. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 a 1324 (Paris, 1993, orig. 1975) [translated and condensed by B. Bray as Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French village 12941324 (Harmondsworth, 1981)], where a tendency to romanticise life in the Occitan countryside, and to see it as possessing unchanging qualities, is crucial to his brillant, if wayward, evocation of rural existence from a late-thirteenthearly-fourteenth-century inquisitorial register. Weis, The yellow cross, mostly using the same texts as Le Roy Ladurie, namely Le Registre dInquisition de Jacques Fournier, Eveque de Pamiers (13181325) ed. Jean Duvernoy (Toulouse, 1965, and additional Corrections, 1972) and Linquisitor Geoffroy dAblis et les Cathares du Comte de Foix (13081309), ed. and trans. A. PalesGobilliard (Paris, 1984), promotes the same image of an unchanging rural landscape, although this time

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ties, tied to the soil, trapped in the cyclical movement of the seasons, forever dwelling in an eternal present and so denied the virtues of linear time, never change the way they do things, never change the way they think things.19 The overt materialist, in the end, reinforces the idealist bias, and, once more, an anti-gravity world of long duration is imagined, where one can jump about all over the place, from century to century, from the Balkans to the Pyrenees, ignoring temporal and cultural specicity in the proving of a point. All these assumptions, all these often unwitting biases, are thrown into high relief when the records of the thirteenth-and-fourteenth-century inquisition in Languedoc are taken into account. Testimonies given to the inquisitors into heretical depravity, numbering in the thousands, involving scores of rural communities, and which provide the most detailed documentation about the heresy of the good men and good women, do not support the general historiographic tendency. The answers to the whys and wherefores of the heresy of the good men must be sought within these specic communities, the worlds in which the heretics actually dwelt, and not through making doubtful deductions, founded upon intellectualist predilections, about outside causes, about timeless verities. Such equations, though clean and neat, presuppose a deeply unconvincing passivity on the part of medieval men and women, heretical or not. The records of the inquisition, frequently a string of fragmentary confessions interspersed with a handful of longer narratives, all too often just get concertinaed to t a priori Cathar-templates, preconceived notions about what a testimony really was saying even if it did not say it (as in mistaking a scribal variation of bons omes for Bosnians and misreading et hoc in vulgari in a seventeenthcentury copy of an inquisition record as et hoc in Bulgaria).20
it is populated with more individuals possessing many more anachronistic attitudes. The same is true for C. Ginzburgs remarkable, but supremely ahistorical, Storia Notturna (Turin, 1989) [translated by R. Rosenthal, Ecstacies. Deciphering the witches sabbath (Harmondsworth, 1991)], where Ludwig Wittgensteins notion of seeing connections from Bemerkungen uber Frazers Golden Bough [Remarks on Frazers Golden Bough], ed. with revised trans. R. Rees (Alantic Highlands, 1979), esp. 88e, [A]n [historical] explanation as an hypothesis of the development, is only one kind of summary of the data, of their synopsis. We can equally well see the data in their relations to one another and make a summary of them in a general picture without putting it in the form of an hypothesis regarding temporal development, and the consequent downplaying of historical change and specicity, justies the lack of gravity in Ginzburgs universe. P. Anderson, Nocturnal enquiry: Carlo Ginzburg, in his A zone of engagement (London, 1992), 207229, thoughtfully, but severely, reviews Ginzburgs unchanging rural world and the materialist assumptions such an idea embraces. W.C. Jordan in his The great famine. Northern Europe in the early fourteenth century (Princeton, 1996), 13, has attacked the general prevalence of such timeless notions about the tempo of rural life in the middle ages. 19 A. Gurevitch, for instance, has expressed these views in his Categories of medieval culture, trans. G.L. Campbell (London, 1985), 98, and Medieval popular culture: problems of belief and perception, trans. J. Bak and P. Hollingsworth (CambridgeParis, 1992), 99. Cf. J. Fentress and C. Wickham, Social memory (Oxford, 1992), 100, who dismiss such views of time and memory in rural communities. 20 As in Lambert, The Cathars, 62, mistaking bonomios sive bonosios in Guilhem de Puylaurens, Chronica Magistri Guillelmi de Podio Laurentii, ed. and trans. J. Duvernoy (Paris, 1976), 32, as referring to the Bonosii, that is Bosnians, and so the Cathars. Or Hamilton, Wisdom from the east, 57 and n. 93, misreading et hoc in vulgari (about a book) in a seventeenth-century copy of an inquisition record ` (in Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, Collection Doat 25, fol. 217r,) as et hoc in Bulgaria. Coincidently,

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What is so fascinating about inquisition records, but what usually relegates them to be strip-mined for footnotes, is that they only make any sense, they only come alive, if an attempt is made to evoke the world in which they were created. This means turning aside from the intellectualist bias and so recognizing that communities actively survive, from one day to the next, from one decade to another, because of an interweaving of thoughts and actions, so individually intimate, so communally strengthening, that the relations a person (or thing) maintains in the material realm entrenches the relations he or she (or it) maintains in the metaphoric, and vice versa. To grasp this deep intimacy, at once collective and particular, is to grasp the meaning of heresy in the Middle Ages. What is being argued here is not that metaphors, language, texts, and such like, merely mirror social structures, habits, and so forth, because this would be no more than the historian simply noting what he or she nds similar between one set of (usually lively) discourses, ideas, symbols, and one set of (often dull and unchanging) practices, behaviours, routines.21 Equally, what is being suggested, is that ideas and habits never hibernate, lie dormant, or remain buried in eternal folkways. Individuals and their societies possess no inherent tendencies, no fundamental hot-wiring, towards any particular theories, towards any particular actions.22 To begin any meditation upon the past with an assumption that some things simply are universal in humans or are always just there in human society, never changing, inert, immobile, is to retreat from attempting an historical explanation about previous rhythms of existence, whether they be six hundred years old or a mere six weeks. More prosaically, one must never approach inquisition documents from Languedoc with the Cathari in hand. No person, whether mendicant inquisitor or the men, women, and children they questioned, ever used the noun Cathar to describe heretics in, for instance, the Toulousain, the Lauragais, or in the pays de Foix. Instead, it was always, with no exceptions, boni homines, bone femine, bons omes, bonas femnas, good men and good women; while the good men and good women themselves frequently referred to each other as the friends of God.23 Cathar (apparently rst used in the middle of the twelfth century by a group of heretics from Cologne,
Lambert, The Cathars, 55 n.29, faults Duvernoy for the same misreading of Doat 25. See also Rot tenwohrer, Der Katherismus: Die Herkunft der Katharer nach Theologie und Geschichte, vol. 3, 529. 21 Despite agreeing with much of what G.M. Spiegel has to say in her inuential History, historicism, and the social logic of the text in the middle ages, The past as text: the theory and practice of medieval historiography (Baltimore, 1997), 328; her nal argument that texts mirror society, or that language mirrors social locations. 22 For example, D. Maybury-Lewis, Introduction. The quest for harmony, and U. Almagor, Introduction. Dual organization reconsidered, in: The attraction of opposites. Thought and society in the dualist mode, ed. D. Maybury-Lewis and U. Almagor (Ann Arbor, 1989), 118, 1932, where each one argues (under the inuence of Claude Levi-Strauss) that dualism is inherent in the human perception of the world; and P. Boyer, The naturalness of religious ideas: a cognitive theory of religion (Berkeley, 1994), where religion is natural and innate to human thought. Now, see S.B. Ortner, Resistence and the problem of ethnographic refusal, Comparative studies in history and society, 37 (1995), 173193, for a discussion on how frequently inherent (and far from theoretical) assumptions often underwrite overtly theoretical scholarship. 23 Pegg, The corruption of angels, 9597.

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or so Eckbert of Schonau wrote in his Sermones contra Catharos of 1163)24 is, and always has been, deeply misleading and applied in such an indiscriminate way by modern historians as to make it, for all intents and purposes, a useless term. The word is thrown about as though it were Cathar-confetti, brightly decorating all sorts of individuals and groups accused of heresy in the Rhineland, England, northern France, northern Italy, Catalonia, and Languedoc, from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, whose connections with one another, though worth pondering, are at best problematic.25 This relentless naming of almost all heretics, particularly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as Cathars (with the exception of the Waldensians) is not only the product of, but the very justication for, the intellectualist approach, in that if the word is used enough times by enough scholars to describe enough heretics in enough places then, in what can only be called a self-fullling prophecy, a great heretical Cathar Church with a systematically similar doctrine comes into being.26 (Intriguingly, historians convinced of Catharism as an institution usually accept that the medieval inquisition was much more institutional than ever was the case.)27 This remorseless relabelling also applies to perfectus, perfect, as a respectful title for a good man, and taken for granted by modern scholarship, but, once again, it is a designation not found in the original records of the Languedocian inquisition.28 Simi24 Eckbert of Schonau, Sermones contra Catharos, PL 195, col. 31: Catharos, id est mundos. Now, see R.I. Moore, The origins of European dissent (London, 1977), 176182. 25 For example, M. Camille, The Gothic idol: ideology and image-making in medieval art (Cambridge, 1989), 211, glosses the Chronicon universale anonymi Laudunensis (11541219), ed. A. Cartelleri (Leipzig, 1909), 6263, where a group of indeles were examined and burnt in 1204, by tagging one of them, a Nicholas, the famous painter in all of France, with no evidence at all, as a Cathar. Or A. Del Col, Dominico Scandella detto Mennocchio: I processi dellInquisizione (15831599) (Pordenone, 1990), liiilxxvi, where the ideas of that sixteenth-century miller from Friuli, Mennocchio the same Mennocchio made famous by C. Ginzburg in Il formaggio e i vermi: Il cosmo di un mugnaio del 500 (Turin, 1976) were clearly derived from Catharism because, and this is Del Cols only evidence, they were so similar. 26 For example, Barber, The Cathars, passim, and B. Hamilton, The Cathars and Christian perfection, in The medieval church: universities, heresy, and the religious life: essays in honour of Gordon Leff, eds. P. Biller and B. Dobson (Woodbridge, 1999), 523, stress the existence of a Cathar Church. 27 B. Hamilton, for example, in his The Medieval inquisition (New York, 1981) argues for the existence of a medieval inquisition. Even H.C. Lea admitted that there was no comprehensive institutional Inquisition throughout the European middle ages. Leas admission is in his A history of the inquisition of the middle ages, vol. 1, 397ff. On Leas thoughts about the medieval inquisition, see Peters, Henry Charles Lea (18251909), 89100 and his Inquisition (New York, 1988), 287292. Now, see Richard Kieckhefer, The ofce of inquisition and medieval heresy: the transition from personal to institutional jurisdiction, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 46 (1995), 3661, 5657, and H.A. Kelly, Inquisition and the prosecution of heresy: misconceptions and abuses, Church history 58 (1989), 439451, for their warnings about not confusing the medieval inquisition with the institutional early modern Inquisition. 28 Pegg, The corruption of angels, 18. Weis, The yellow cross, 2, where the fact that Jacques Fourniers inquisition did not record this title is put down to spite on the part of the bishop-inquisitor. D. Muller, Frauen vor der Inquisition: Lebensform, Glaubenszeugnis und Arburteilung der Deutschen un Franzosi schen Katharerinnen (Mainz, 1996), is a nuanced study marred by a tension (largely between footnotes and text) between using terminology like perfect, with all that this implies, and the evidence that does not warrant such usage. It seems that perfectus, if it was transcribed, has only survived in the Collection

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larly, the heretici were never called Albigenses in the registers of the inquisition. Yet, in histories and encyclopedias until the beginning of the last century, Albigensi an was almost always the term for the good men. Conybeare and Alphandery, in their respective ways, illustrate this terminological shift from the somewhat inappropriate Albigenses (though still with some sense of specicity) to the incredibly inappropriate Cathari (with its wildly imperial and immigrant connotations).29 On the other hand, what will be consistently found in inquisition registers is the epithet good man for a heretic. This is terribly important because all men, heretical or not, especially in the rst half of the thirteenth century in the Toulousain and the Lauragais, were described in charters, wills, oaths, communal decisions, court appearances, in everything and anything, as boni homines and probi homines in Latin, while in Occitan they were bons omes, prozomes, and prodomes.30 This fact, if nothing else, should shake our complaisancy about using Cathar and suggest that research into the specic communities questioned by the inquisition will reveal a very different world than the one now taken for granted. To be sure, the Dominican inquisitor (and former heresiarch at Piacenza) Rainier Sacconi in his Summa de Catharis et Pauperibus de Lugduno of 1250 did add a tiny appendix about the Cathars of the Toulousain church, and those of Albi and Carcassonne towards the end of his detailed treatise about the Cathari of Lombardy, but there is nothing in this brief afterthought except an opinion that the langue doc heretics were obviously connected to the langue de si dualists.31 Only ve years earlier, in a sharp and rather telling contrast, two other Dominican inquisitors, Bernart de Caux and Joan de SantPeire, in the largest inquisition of the middle ages, where almost six thousand men and women from the Toulousain and the Lauragais were questioned in two hundred and one days, not only was Cathar never uttered, or in any of the testimonies

Doat (e.g. Doat 26, fol. 258r259r). This apparent fact, in stark contrast to original manuscripts surviving from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, should suggest that the seventeenth-century copyists employed by Jean de Doat perhaps took more transcribing liberties than is often realised. On Jean-Baptiste ` Colberts commission and Doats copying, see L. Delisle, Le Cabinet des manuscrits de la Bibliotheque ` Imperiale, Histoire generale de Paris (Paris, 1868), vol. 1, 441442; H. Omont, La Collection Doat a la ` Bibliotheque Nationale: Documents sur les recherches de Doat dans les archives du sud-ouest de la France ` ` de 1663 a 1670, Bibliotheque de lEcole des Chartes, 77 (1916), 286336; L. Kolmer, Ad Capiendas Vulpes. Die Ketzerbekampfung in Sud-frankreich in der ersten Halfte des 13. Jahrhunderts und die Ausbil dung des Inquisitionsverfahrens (Bonn, 1982), 1215, and his, Colbert und die Entstehung der Collection Doat, Francia, 7 (1979), 463489. 29 On the meaning of Albigenses, see C. Thouzellier, Heresie et Heretiques: Vaudois, Cathares, Patar ins, Albigeois (Rome, 1969), 223262, and J-L. Biget, Les Albigeois: remarques sur une denomination, in: Inventer lHeresie?: Discours polemiques et pouvoirs avant linquisition, ed. M. Zerner (Nice, 1998), 219256. 30 Pegg, The corruption of angels, 95. 31 Rainier Sacconi, Summa de Catharis et Pauperibus de Lugduno, is in the preface of Antoine Dondai` nes edition of Un Traite neo-manicheen du XIIIe siecle: Le Liber de duobus principiis suivi dun fragment de rituel cathare (Rome, 1939), p. 77. Now, see Thouzellier, Catharisme et Valdeisme en Languedoc, 1926, and the more general discussion of Italian heresy (and one which assumes a strong, and obvious, connection to the heretics of Languedoc) in: C. Lansing, Power and purity: Cathar heresy in medieval Italy (New York, 1998), esp. 45, 1516, 3739, 188190.

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was an elaborate dualist theology expounded, but no elaborate international heretical organization, no Cathar Church, was discovered by them or, and this can never be emphasized enough, will such an entity be unearthed by historians (unless, of course, hundreds of references to heretici and boni homines are persistently, and rather unashamedly, translated as referring to Cathars and perfects).32 This desire to believe that secret heretical knowledge, that a hidden Church, was, and still is, forever waiting to be found, forever ready to rise and shine when things are just right, is profoundly seductive. The Cathars, inuencing everything and anything, have been tied to the Holy Grail, to courtly love, to the hidden secrets of the Knights-Templars, to the magical lodges of late-nineteenth-century mysticism, and even to the veracity of reincarnation.33 Occasionally, these occult fantasies are grafted onto the related, and just as anachronistic, need to see the good men and good women as Protestants before their time34 like the irrepressible Conybeare, whose gift for
Pegg, The corruption of angels, esp. 130. See, out of a vast and extremely popular literature, especially D. Roche, Etudes Manicheennes et Cathares (Paris, 1952) and R. Nelli, Histoire secrete du Languedoc (Paris: Albin Michel, 1978). Roche ` was the founder of a neo-Cathar group at the turn of this century and of the journal Cahiers dEtudes Cathares. On Roche, see J-L. Biget, Mythographie du Catharisme, Cahiers de Fanjeaux: Historiogra phie du catharisme, 14 (1979), 308310. Roche also had a curious correspondence with Simon Weil; for example, the latter once wrote and cited by J. Duvernoy, Albigeisme ou Catharisme, in his Cathare, ` Vaudois et Beguines, dissidents du pays dOc (Toulouse, 1994), 15 that Catharism was la derniere expression vivante de lantiquite pre-romaine Weil had more to say about Catharism and Occitanism ` ` in her Lagonie dune civilisation vue a travers une poeme epique, and En quoi linspiration occitanien ne, in: Ecrits historiques et politiques (Paris, 1960), 6674 and 7584. On Weil, see, for example, P. Winch, Simone Weil. The just balance (Cambridge, 1989), 369, where he considers Weils notion that Catharism was a descendant of late antique neo-Platonic Christianity to be historically correct; he even argues for Catharism to be the offspring of Gnosticism because (and this is his only evidence) of a similarity of ideas. Barber, The Cathars, 203212, is good on Weil, Roche, and the odd Otto Rahn. A. Guirdham, The Cathars and reincarnation: The record of a past life in 13th century France (London, 1970), even documents a fascinating case of an English woman who was convinced that she had experienced a past life as a crezen in the early thirteenth-century Lauragais. A southern French travelogue, heavily laced with Cathar fact and fancy, is R. Klawinski, Chasing the heretics: A modern journey through the medieval Languedoc (St. Paul, 1999). S. OShea, The perfect heresy: The revolutionary life and death of the medieval Cathars (New York, 2000), is really about the Albignesian Crusade and, despite a good bibliography, wrong on just about everything. As for Catharism and the Holy Grail, see M. Roquebert, Les Cathares et le graal (Toulouse, 1994). On the innumerable (and usually rather odd) theories about courtly love, Amour courtois, and the Cathars, see the excellent critical survey of R. Boase, The origin and meaning of courtly love: A critical study of European scholarship (Manchester, 1977), 7781. Today, the Centre dEtudes Cathares at Carcassonne, still keeps, perhaps unintentionally, the neo-Cathar ame alive. The Centre dEtudes Cathares also publishes the serious and learned journal Heresis. Now see Duvernoy, Albigeisme ou Catharisme, 1538. 34 J. Duvernoy, for one, basically sees the Cathars as proto-Protestants in Cathares et vaudois sont-ils des precurseurs de la Reforme? in his Cathare, Vaudois et Beguines, dissidents du pays dOc (Toulouse, 1994), 5362. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not surprisingly, such views were quite common amongst Catholic and Protestant thinkers. On these early modern ideas about the Cathars, see A. Borst, Neue Funde und Forschungen zur Geschichte der Katharer, Historische Zeitschrift, 174 (1952), 17; H. ` Duranton, Les Albigeois dans les histoires generales et les manuels scolaires du XVIe au XVIIIe siecle, Cahiers de Fanjeaux: Historiographie du catharisme, 14 (1979), 85118; A. Friesen, Medieval heretics or forerunners of the Reformation: the Protestant rewriting of the history of medieval heresy, in The
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seeing the Cathars wherever he happened to look that day, allowed him to observe in his portrait of the Anabaptists for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopdia Britannica that their sixteenth-century zeal clearly had an afnity to the Cathari and other medieval sects.35 Further, mistaken notions about the Cathars have led a number of historians, who are not medievalists, to see these supposed heretics as not only having a Church but also possessing what can only be called a distinct ethnicity along with their beliefs, one that therefore makes them a useful past analogy to, say, the systematic destruction of European Jews during the Holocaust or the genocidal violence in the former Yugoslavia.36 It is because such comparisons are so important to historical research though, once more, questions about apparent continuities and similarities immediately present themselves that the fact, fantasy, and ction about the Cathars, the Albigenses, and the good men, deserves to be rethought. The scholarship on the Cathars, Albigenses, and the good men, particularly for Languedoc, rests upon almost three centuries of extraordinary learning in a way that has been, and still is, rarely equalled in the historical study of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, just as one may admire the longevity of the erudite assumptions of Conybeare and Alphandery, their arguments, though not quite ready to be pensioned off just yet, do suggest an intellectual languor whose apparent calm is much more stiing to the historical imagination than might at rst appear. What has been attempted here is a rethinking of the Cathars and the good men that, in the end, hopes to shake, if only for a moment, this Edwardian historiographic stillness.
Mark Gregory Pegg is Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis. His The corruption of angels: the Great Inquisition of 12451246 (Princeton, 2001) was recently published. He is currently researching and writing a study on heresy throughout the middle ages.

devil, heresy, and witchcraft in the middle ages: Essays in honor of Jeffrey B. Russell, ed. A. Ferreiro (Leiden, 1998), 165190; and Barber, The Cathars, 212225. Interestingly, under Albigenses, the rst edition of the Encyclopdia Britannica or, A dictionary of arts and sciences (Edinburgh, 1771), 1, 75, noted this: They [the Albigenses] are ranked among the grossest heretics, the Manicheans, by Roman Catholics; from which charge Protestants generally acquit them, though with some limitations At the time of the Reformation, those of the Albigenses who remained embraced Calvinism. 35 F. Conybeare, Anabaptists, Encyclopdia Britannica, vol. 1, 904. 36 For example, on the Cathars and the Holocaust, see G. Lerner, In the footsteps of the Cathars, in her Why history matters; life and thought (Oxford, 1997), 1932, and, on the killing of the Albigensians and the massacres in Bosnia, see David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the failure of the West (New York, 1995), 27.